Predictive Data and Using Specifics as a Method of Marketing

“We are able to counteract a lot of the misinformation and noise by simply being specific. Our technology is focused on the data centre and cloud-based environments — areas of high-traffic rates and complexity that are difficult to control.“

Insightive.tv: What challenges do you face when attempting to reach target audiences?

Dave: Within the entire emerging cybersecurity sector, the largest challenge is that our technology disrupts the existing means of securing digital infrastructure. We are not only competing against other emerging technologies, but prioritisation within the security stack and the traditional methods in which companies have already invested. Within this broad landscape, we must educate customers on the improvements that have been made in business application and data security, along with the escalation of the threats.

The noise within the market is another problem. The CISO — one of the key stakeholders our teams must contact — is constantly bombarded by vendors and has, in general, become quite selective in choosing which vendors they interact with. We have to be extremely succinct in regards to the problems that we are solving.

Insightive.tv: How do you cut through the noise and connect with the CISO, along with other relevant stakeholders?

Dave: Our product solves a long-standing weak point in cybersecurity. Traditionally, security professionals treat internal traffic within their data centres and cloud as a trusted zone — simply focusing on a strong perimeter defence. It is very difficult to implement internal controls without disrupting or interfering with legitimate processes. If done incorrectly, such interruptions can have a material effect on the business. But this is no longer a sufficient approach in an era of ever greater virtualization and dynamic application of infrastructure.

We are able to counteract a lot of the misinformation and noise by simply being specific. Our technology is focused on the data centre and cloud-based environments — areas of high-traffic rates and complexity that are difficult to control. A lot of vendors talk about themselves in terms of a technology category — detection and response or intrusion prevention. They do not differentiate what assets and parts of the network they are protecting. If you look at deception technology vendors, for example, we are really the only one that focuses on applying that technology specifically to high-traffic data centres and cloud environments. Our competitors focus more on the application of that technology to endpoints. This allows us to position ourselves as one of only a handful of vendors that have purposefully designed technology to go into high capacity and high traffic areas to implement security controls that can address the unique requirements of that environment. Through this specification, we are able to build credibility.

One very successful marketing campaign we have undertaken involved the release of an open source penetration testing tool that we call the Infection Monkey. This is an application that can be used to expose the ability for an individual to move laterally across different servers without detection once inside a data centre or cloud infrastructure. In most cases, this shines a bright light on the internal problems that organisations have once core perimeter security has been breached, and the difficulty in containing a breach once it is within that ‘trusted zone.’ This has helped us generate awareness about the main problem that our services resolve while bringing people to our website and raising brand awareness. We have seen tremendous response from this and gained great coverage from a PR and publication standpoint. This is a tool that plainly adds value by allowing potential customers to better understand their own systems while demonstrating to our own customers the efficacy of the systems we provide.

We then work to push this messaging through trusted networks. This includes getting referrals from clients, analysts, advisor networks, as well as bloggers and the media. Even more importantly, once we have been able to establish a relationship and begin work with a customer, we have to make sure that we deliver on what we said we were going to do — it is all about building trust. This is part of the reason that we are focusing our efforts on certain regions — the US and sections of EMEA in particular — and have turned down business in other areas. This allows us to make sure that we are capable of appropriately supporting customers in every country in which we operate.

Insightive.tv: How do you see your marketing strategies developing in the future?

Dave: It is key to have as much information as possible about targeted accounts and individuals. This puts our sales teams in a position to have the most relevant conversations possible. When meeting with the CISO, you often only have one shot to make an impact. It is vital to be better prepared than the ‘other guy’. One of the latest tools we have begun leveraging is predictive data. This has helped us further enhance the personalised nature of our messaging beyond the capabilities of a more static profile.

We work very closely with customers to understand the challenges that they are facing when it comes to data centres and the cloud, along with the problems they anticipate in the future. But, we also look at the market on a more macro level — what trends do we see by region and what does third party data tell us about changes in the market? It is then a question of validating that information against the customers that we have and the ongoing conversation that we are conducting with prospective customers. It is our responsibility to continually recalibrate our point of view based on what we see in real world scenarios.

Our goal, in much of our marketing, is to engage new customers around the question of how prepared they are to detect and respond to an active security breach — what would you do if your system was breached right now? If you look at public breaches, the average time that it takes between a company actually being breached and detecting that incident is six-months. That is an incredible amount of time in which damage can be done and data stolen. There are better ways to approach security incident monitoring, investigation and response. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to expand because I think there is an opportunity for us to build a great company. The technology that we developed can enable security operations teams, and their incident response teams to dramatically reduce that amount of time. In this case, time is money.

Dave Burton is VP of Marketing at GuardiCore. With twenty years of executive marketing experience and a proven track record leading cross function teams within burgeoning tech-firms, Dave joined GuardiCore in 2015 to take their marketing operations to a global level. Previously VP of Global Marketing at NComputing and VP of Marketing Operations at AppSense, Dave is focused on demand generation to establish GuardiCore as a global leader in cybersecurity. We spoke with Dave to gain insight into how changes in the cyber-threat landscape are affecting how he cuts through market noise to connect with key stakeholders.

GuardiCore is a leading provider of datacentre and cloud security systems. Delivering real-time breach detection and response, GuardiCore’s systems micro-segment internal traffic, provide complete visibility across the datacenter and ensure continuity when migrating workloads across platforms and clouds. By reducing the time it takes to identify a breach from months to minutes, Guardicore is one of two major Israeli-based cybersecurity firms that are changing the way organisations fight cyberattacks.